Sunset Mag’s Former Offices

Once upon a time there was a dream destination in the Bay Area that anyone could visit—a place to soak up the sun and get immersed in the very best of California Ranch-style living.

But today, that destination is being threatened.

This place of dreams opened its doors in 1951, during the postwar boom years, when Lane Publishing's distinguishedSunset magazine debuted its handsome new headquarters in Menlo Park.

Designed in the California Ranch style by architect Cliff May (1908-1989) and landscape architect Thomas Church (1902-1978), the 6.7-acre campus at Willow Road at Middlefield welcomed thousands of visitors to enjoy a 'living museum,' a place where they could experience for themselves what the Western lifestyle was all about.

Nearly 75 years later, here in 1975, that living museum is on the brink of losing its life. But hope remains.

"The Sunset campus is a touchstone of what it meant to live in mid-century California, and the West," says preservation consultant Robert Chattel, whose firm, in a bid to help save the campus, has prepared a nomination for listing the former Sunset property on the National Register of Historic Places.

"The work that they did there gave a lot of meaning to what it means to live in California. It's a unique experience. Mid-century houses are not public spaces, whereas the Sunset magazine campus was, and visited by so many."

Home to idea-makers and trendsetters, the ever-evolving campus featured modernist gardens, and was the place where Sunset's Western Garden Book was born. A test kitchen turned out new recipes, and offices were busily creating and editing Sunset magazine content. Workshops, home tours, and garden tours were all part of an exciting modern lifestyle that made headlines from coast to coast.

But today, that important part of mid-century history is endangered big time! The Cultural Landscape Foundation recently considered the current state of the Sunset campus as an "at-risk landscape" and "the threat to the site has become dire." Without legal protections in place, the 75-year-old Sunset campus could be unrecognizably altered, or worse yet, entirely leveled.

Sunset vacated the space in 2015, and the campus' new owner has proposed to construct a mixed-use, multi-tower development, with a 130-room hotel, over 350,000 square feet of office space, 40,000 square feet of retail, and 665 housing units.

Thanks to the efforts of the Menlo Park Historical Association and Chattel's firm, Chattel, Inc., that nomination for listing on the National Register has been submitted.

Chattel has nominated a number of other Cliff May-designed sites, including the Bell Canyon Equestrian Center in unincorporated Ventura County. The group, which was founded in 1994, has also been working on a nomination for Cliff May #3 at Riviera Ranch, near Sullivan Canyon in Los Angeles, which Chattel notes as "a quintessential Cliff May house that the architect owned from 1937 to 1956."